score:20
Prohibition ended just before scientific polling took off in the U.S., so we don't have high-quality polls from the 1920s. What we do have are polls of magazine readers.*
The results from the Literary Digest Prohibition Polls are at this link. To summarize them:
The earliest scientific poll I could find on prohibition comes from Gallup in December 1936. In it, 67% of respondents answered "no" to the question, "If the question of national prohibition should come up again, would you vote to make the country dry?"
* Keep in mind that bias enters these numbers twice: magazine readership is not representative of the population, nor are those who respond to magazine polls representative of magazine readership. But in this case, they actually might have been fairly accurate (see the second bullet point).
Citation for Gallup Poll: USGALLUP.DC2036.R01; sample size around 1,500. I can't provide a direct link because I found it at the Roper Center's Public Opinion Archives, which is a password-protected database.
Upvote:3
My older relatives who lived through this era (most dead now,) were generally opposed to prohibition. They were very rural and lived in Idaho. My grandmother told me that her brothers and several other locals were involved in moonshining.
Upvote:6
According to "Generations" by William Strauss and Neil Howe, Prohibition was pushed through in the U.S. by an unlikely "out" coalition of social reformers, agrarian interests, and women. (The 18th and 19th Amendments came close together.) They formed a "majority," but it was as "non-mainstream" a majority as one can get. Prohibition barely passed.
Prior to Prohibition, American women drank a lot less than American men, which is why Prohibition was seen (and sold) as "protecting women." But it led to furtive drinking in "speakeasies" (rather than saloons), by "mixed" company. (Women originally went to speakeasies as "chaperones" so if a man was with a woman, the presumption was that he wasn't drinking, even though he was.) Prohibition was repealed when women got accustomed to drinking, undermining its core constituency.